Extraordinary, if a little uneven, as collections of essays and lectures tend to be. In most chapters, Jonas writes in a smooth, accessible style, which is critically important for this sort of philosophy. In a few places, he does unfortunately descend into the kind of needlessly-convoluted vocabulary and sentence construction characteristic of academics who wish to obscure how little they really have to say: in other words, you can tell when Jonas "didn't have time to make it shorter." But it isn't for lack of something to say. Not at all.

Jonas methodically debunks dualism and naturalism on the basis of biology, arguing that mind arises symbiotically with primitive multicellular life, a necessary corollary to nonadjacent sensory perception and motility, in other words, with desire. This startling clarification finds a portion of its source in Jonas' earlier work on Gnosticism, which introduced mind/body dualism into Western thought through the notion that people are immortal souls trapped in corrupted matter. Gnostic dualism has retained a firm grip on both popular and educated Western thought for centuries, mainly, Jonas says, due to Descarte.

(I suspect that Gnostic ideas had introduced subtle corruptions into the metaphysics of all three major Abrahamic faiths centuries earlier, but perhaps these would not have survived in the absence of Descarte's influence. We see a secularized version today quite starkly in science fiction, in the concept that with the right technology, a person's essential self could be transferred out of the biological body and into a synthetic one, yet lose nothing important in translation).

I'm extremely grateful for the gift of this book; it was a perfect follow-on to John Haught's God After Darwin, as Haught leans on Jonas for parts of his argument. Highly recommended.

Brilliant. Jonas belongs among the great 20th century political theorists/scientists/philosophers like Voegelin, Strauss, and Arendt. In this book, he weaves together his "existential interpretation of biological facts" with reflections on the senses, gnosticism, nihilism, ontology, ethics, dualism, Darwinism, and more.

Hans Jonas' elegantly written and, I would say, spiritually moving argument against Descartes' dualism and the worldview of a purely mathematical and mechanical universe. I can't seem to get away from thinking about this book and will be re-reading it soon!

In this series of twelve essays, Jonas critiques a Western philosophy of mind and a Western philosophy of the organism. His main argument runs something like this: Descartes separated the human mind from its body; the mind then ascends in Western science,the body floats away to insignificance, and modern-day existentialism and nihilism is the result. There is now a "reduction of the formal essence of life to the vanishing point of a mere vital momentum without specific original content...." Nothingness springs from the denial of essence and, with nihilism, man loses a "being" that transcends "the flux of becoming."

The Darwinist picture ends up in the same spot, as a "Cartesian position without its metaphycial [sic?] cargo." The organism is merely a machine in a clockwork universe, run by a "mathematical god." Random mutations are acted on by the external force of natural selection. Progress is by "elimination," which is a "negative substitute for teleology." Evolution is "advance through mischance, of ascent by accident." There's no perpetual form that transcends change. "Being is becoming." The essence of life is "just self-preservation, which is analogous to the inertial laws ruling the conduct of a particle." Something like "The will to power," Jonas concludes, "seemed the only alternative left if the original essence of man had evaporated in the transitoriness and whimsicality of the evolutionary process."

This is not Jonas' vision. His philosophy of life goes back to its origins or close to it. Metabolism is the first form of that freedom that emancipated life from matter. Self-preservation was not at all random and mindless. Even at this lowest level, life "prefigures mind," Jonas argues, because there was variability in how to attain life's end. The purpose of life, the essential ends of life, are fixed, species by species. But the objects and actions related to these ends are variable and subject to choice - a degree of free choice based on what the organism faces. Within a species itself, there is variability that constitutes an "individuality" and a sense of self, "however faint its voice." With the separation from plants, animal motility began the long path toward the separation of action from purpose. Through perception, animals bridged the gap between here and there. Emotion, as desire, bridged the gap between now and then. What was wanted was over there, which is a separation of the organism from the object in space in time.

"To move and to feel" is the animal soul. This is Jonas' vision of the animal organism. "Animal being is... essentially passionate being," he states. "Living things are creatures of need. Only living things have needs and act on needs. Need is based both on the necessity for the continuous self-renewal of the organism by the metabolic process, and on the organism's elementary urge thus precariously to continue itself." Need manifests itself on the level of animality as appetite, fear and "all the rest of the emotions." Need propels the animal self outward across space and time, reaching out for objects to satisfy need and fear picks up and wards off threats and danger. The other emotions are the supporting cast. Animals are not mindless, soulless or passive beings subject solely to random mutation and external pressure. Animal life takes an active role through its own mindful freedom in ensuring its own existence. It is this passion to live that is the animal's form and essence, and it is this that allows them, in some degree, to create their existence. They are existentialists with purpose. They don't have the luxury for despair. Animals are existentialists with soul.

If Jonas had stopped his argument here he would have left his reader with a substantially new vision for humanity, one that is continuous with the rest of animal life, despite the differences in mental capacity. But in his transition essay, Jonas says "we have passed the borderline between the physical and the mental sphere" and this is where "biology cedes the field to a philosophy of man." With evolution's progressive freedom ending in the human mind, the connection between purpose and action is severed. With our mental freedom, we wander around without soul. We are anchorless and we wonder about the meaning of existence. It's no wonder that there is existential despair. It's no wonder we can get a Sartre who makes stuff up to fill this nothingness.

The latter series of essays are dense and it's not clear to me where Jonas himself ends up about all of this. Yet the answers are all there in the first half of this book. In our biology lies our essence. It's built on self-preservation, but it is not "merely" self-preservation. Freedom, right, justice and other philosophical themes are embedded in that notion, as well as our social and tribal nature, and our fear of death and religious impulses. And we also have a capacity for beauty and for wandering into the distant corners of the cosmos. These are by-products - the sweetest layer of freedom - of a mind that was designed to help us survive.

This is one of the best books I’ve read, certainly one of my favorite philosophy books.

The book primarily explores the paradox of how deterministic material reality shouldn’t need to be experienced. This is not framed as a “hard question of consciousness,” because such framing assumes materialism as the true grounds, and consciousness as a problem which needs to be somehow solved using material laws. Instead Jonas traces the emergence of the elements our being back to organic roots. Everything we know can be seen as a function of life. He doesn’t go very much deeper than that, no true animism or hylozoism or pansychism, but instead takes single-celled organisms as the starting point. And he builds a solid phenomenology from that.

According to Jonas, the ancients believed that everything was life, then we entered into a dualist era where we separated the mechanical cosmos from the divine beyond (a divinity which is also present in our souls and our experience), and that now we’ve entered into an age of materialism where life and consciousness are seen as a puzzle to be solved, or simply explained away. He chooses to embrace the paradox instead. That’s why I love this book. He does an absolutely beautiful job in outlining that paradox.

That portion of the book is an absolute classic, a must-read, and woefully underappreciated. But the final portion of the book is speculative and a bit more scattered, though still extremely valuable. He launches into that final portion like this: He claims that phenomenology and existentialism help us to grasp the world, but that existentialism is fundamentally nihilistic, and beyond that realm we have only mythology as symbolism. I agree with this, or at least I like the idea a lot. Then he goes on to speculate his own mythology and a mystical moral responsibility which somehow connects life to the divine or the eternal image of god, which is our responsibility. He’s very (understandably) troubled by the evil and suffering in the world and he’s trying to make sense of that. Look up his biography to see how the forces of evil touched his life. But in the end I think he focused on an ethics that’s somehow based on his speculative mythology rather than truly on the phenomenon of life.

The real conclusion isn’t found in the particular speculative mythology that he lays out near the end. It’s in his stating the fact that we need to keep developing our own mythologies which embrace the paradox that the book outlines. If his particular mythology doesn’t totally resonate with me, I still appreciate that he kicked off the speculative mythology project by offering his own. I take it as a call to develop more of these mythologies. None of them will be “right.” Many of them will be valuable.

Anyway, I loved the book and I’ll be reading his collection of essays next, followed by his book about the ethics of technology.